What are the components and material used in large wind turbines?

[Aathil]

Hi everyone, its my first time here and I was wondering if I could get some help.

I have this university course project in which I have present a presentation on a 7MW Wind turbine that is hypothetically designed by my team. Our design consists of the following;
Wind Turbine type = Onshore HAWT
Rotor Diameter = 165 m
Blade length = 80 m
Swept area = 21,000 m²
Hub Height= 100 m
Our location is set to be some where along the coasts of UK.

One of the problems the team and I are facing is that we are not sure how we could cost this wind turbine, as you know transporting a 80 m blade isn't an easy task nor is the assembling. Another problem we face is that we are unaware of the type of material to use for our hypothetical wind turbine.
From my understanding, a steel tower is really hard to transport but a concrete tower can be built on site, other than concrete being used for the tower, what other materials do Wind turbine manufacturers use for the main components, such as the blades, tower, hub, yaw etc.?

Any help I could get will useful.

Thank you :)

[vella98]

Thanks

[MojoEA]

the simple answer is steel, pretty much all of the components will be made of some grade of steel and the blades will be almost certainly be GRP fiberglass, although they might have another material for the cores such as expanded aluminum or even balsa,

The towers will be no more difficult to transport than the blades, they will normally be split into 2 or 3 sections for transport and bolted together on site with internal flanges. to get some ideas on costs, have a look at sparesinmotion or some other similar website to give you an idea of component and complete turbine costs, although keep in mind that spares are generously marked up and second hand turbines can seem very cheap. a decent rule of thump is for spares, if you were buying directly for production rather than as spares it would be about 1/3 of the list price, and second hand turbines would have been 3 - 4 times their price when new.